The Married Man

by Edmund White

  Despite the blur and hubbub of service, he noticed that Big Julien seemed irritated by Pierre-Yves’s excessive self-assurance. During their hundreds of gym classes together, Austin had carefully studied PierreYves, who seemed almost too predictably torn between his French father and Russian mother, between a Cartesian trust in method and reason and a Slavic impulse toward intense feeling and self-destruction. The result was that he was always smiling coolly, pityingly at his interlocutor’s “errors in taste” (the French side), when he wasn’t running out for debilitating revels on acid or submitting slavishly to a cruel Brazilian lover, who actually beat him.

  Big Julien and Pierre-Yves had drifted into an argument about politics. Since Austin had been trapped into another noisy conversation with the very drunk (and always slightly mad) psychiatrist Hubert, who was insisting for some reason on talking about photography “as a form of contamination,” he couldn’t follow Julien’s and Pierre-Yves’s dispute. But he could tell it was heating up to an uncomfortable degree.

  And then it was over. The kitchen sink was piled high with dirty dishes, everything smelled of cigarettes, the pillows on the daybed had been pummeled to half their normal plumpness and the round white tablecloth had been stained red in one place, as though Caesar had been stabbed through his toga just there. Big Julien, the married man, did nothing to help. He stood between the open French windows and looked out at the immense stone snail shell, the steeply pitched church roof beyond and the roiling clouds above ignited by the city lights. Although the day had been unseasonably warm, the night was cool. Austin worried that Julien might catch cold after the flushed excitement of all the talk and wine and heavy food, especially since he was wearing only his ugly green linen jacket and he looked pale. And it was a weekday; Julien would have to go to work early tomorrow: he’d said the whole office was en charrette, which was architect’s lingo for a round-the-clock blitz.

  “Did you like Joséphine?” Austin asked him, standing next to him in the cold window, listening to the clip-clop of high heels as a solitary, determined walker passed by on the street below. He could smell the dish detergent on his hands, an acidic, grease-cutting citron, and he worried that it might offend Julien.

  “Charming,” he said. “But those opinionated men—have you known them for long?”

  “Years.”

  “And do you find them fascinating?”

  “Well. They’re friends. I don’t stop to wonder whether a friend is ‘fascinating’ or not.”

  “No. Of course not. Childhood friends are exempt from all criticism.”

  “They’re not exactly childhood friends—I came to France only eight years ago. Do you have lots of old friends?”

  “Yes, but I never see them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I prefer to think about them. My friends mean so much to me, but only in my thoughts, in my memory.”

  “What a poetic idea,” Austin murmured dreamily with a soft smile, because he thought Julien might kiss him. At a less romantic moment Austin might have objected strenuously to such a chilly notion. He wondered if it wasn’t just an affectation Julien had invented on the spot so that he himself could sound “fascinating,” a quality he apparently rated highly.

  But Julien didn’t kiss him and a moment later he was gone, but not before Austin had lined him up for dinner two nights later. At the door Julien gave him a big, helpless smile and let his hand sketch out something indecisive, between a hug and a handshake, which ended up as a sort of clumsy pat on the arm—the only awkward gesture Austin had seen this terribly conscious man make.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning at ten Pierre-Yves, dressed in new jogging shoes and a blue nylon track suit and crisp white T-shirt, was at the door, playfully exasperated because Austin was barely awake and not yet in his gym clothes. Pierre-Yves beat his hands together rhythmically and called out, “Vite, vite, vite.” He’d been an Olympic ice-skating coach and retained a vigorous manner, though with Austin he was obviously working with hopeless material. Their whole “routine” (vaudeville, not workout) consisted of Austin’s irrepressible desire to gossip in mid-exercise, whereas Pierre-Yves, at least in his official capacity, demanded that his student finish all twenty repetitions before jabbering anymore. When Austin said, “So I see you’re not bruised today,” or “What on earth were you and my guest Julien fighting about last night?” Pierre-Yves raised a warning finger and pronounced the next number louder (“Dix, onze, douze …”). He’d assumed the role of outwardly stern, secretly amiable taskmaster. Austin spent so much of his workout on his pale blue rubber mat on the floor, looking up at Pierre-Yves, that he constantly had a perverse, child’s-eye view of this man with the lean, muscled legs, the compact torso, the smooth, hairless arms, the powerful jaw and small, neat features. When he was younger, in the pre-AIDS days, he’d seldom hesitated to touch another man seductively, a big grin on his face, but now he’d trained himself to recognize that he was positive, that other men were more reticent sexually than he, and that even if they weren’t it was hardly likely that he would be their first choice.

  “Did you like my friend Julien?”

  “… Dix-neuf, vingt. He has very strong opinions, non?”

  “He said the same thing about you.” They both laughed.

  After Austin’s next series of push-ups, Pierre-Yves started nodding about something as though he’d reflected further. “He’s certainly a nice-looking man. He’s married?”

  “Did he tell you that? He is married, but why did he mention it, I wonder. Perhaps he was trying to keep himself from being too attractive to you.”

  Pierre-Yves shook his head twice, as though he was baffled. “No. Not at all. In any event, he’s not homosexual, is he?”

  “I should hope so. Why else—”

  “Un, deux, trois …”

  At the next interval Pierre-Yves was talking about his plans to accompany three drag queens to a ball.

  “Will you be in drag?” Austin asked. The whole subject bored him stupid.

  “Me?” Pierre-Yves asked, shocked. “I’ll be their escort. The man.” He added in English, “It will be a funny evening,” making the usual French mistake of imagining funny was the adjectival form of fun.

  Pierre-Yves seemed cautious about Julien, but then people never made the least effort to be fair and objective but always imposed their idiosyncratic reading on a friend’s new lover; they didn’t stop for a moment to wonder if he had qualities that would make the poor friend happy. They only judged the newcomer according to whether he was perceived as a threat or an ally. Although Austin thrived on confusion, he expected reasonableness and calm from other people, at least when they advised him at crucial moments in his life.

  Later in the day Gregg had dropped in unexpectedly for a cup of tea. “Hon,” Gregg said, “that new Julien of yours is a doll.” Gregg liked to talk like a waitress in a forties film and he often said things such as, “Time to cool my aching dogs,” or “Your mom”—meaning himself—“is plumb wore out slinging hash,” by which he meant he’d had a tiring day inserting slender disposable wands into clients’ pressure points. But his camp way of talking didn’t mean that he was effeminate or insincere.

  Austin had first met Gregg eight years ago at the gym, when they’d both just arrived in Paris. Back then Gregg had recently left a Midwestern college, where he’d been a dance major, in order to come to Paris. He knew no one. Paris had been a scintillating childhood dream, but the reality was friendless and dull, at least at first. In repose his face was a devastatingly bleak portrait of loneliness, as though he’d been irreversibly disillusioned as a kid. When he was engaged in conversation, however, he lit up, illuminated by curiosity and warmth.

  At least he was friendly and easygoing with Austin, who was older and unthreatening, and he never hesitated to quiz Austin about the most minor acquisitions in his apartment. Gregg noticed even a new book, and every day
the mail brought four or five of them, almost all catalogues of antique auctions or furniture shows.

  He was pretty and sensitive but he did everything to hide it, slouching around, skull shaved, fine-boned body bulked up by army fatigues, only the trousers, when he bent to tie the laces of his military shoes, stretching across his rounded butt and bulging thighs to reveal the body he took such pains disguising—and building up.

  He was always dropping in with a new story of a sex adventure.

  “Mother, I was in the Parc de Vincennes this morning and I saw this hot kid, a real pervert, you could tell by his hungry, pervy eyes that he had a hungry hole, we went up a deserted path, just the occasional jogger, and the kid starts playing down there and tout d’un coup don’t you just know your daughter was fisting that sick pig right there in broad daylight!”

  “Dirty?”

  “Leave it to Mom for the practical questions. No, that little Jean-François must douche every morning just in case….”

  Although he was vulgar and sassy, Gregg had deep inner resources of grief. He once confessed as he was massaging Austin (for he was also an occasional masseur) that he’d never known his father. In the small Ohio town where he’d grown up he’d assumed his dad must have run off with another woman soon after his birth; that was the version his mother had always given him. But then one day his mother and he were driving to the supermarket when they saw on a park bench a small, graying vagrant asleep, his face puffy, the upper lip bruised a dark purple. “That’s your father,” Gregg’s mother had said.

  As Gregg talked, Austin was lying on his stomach, his face turned away from him. He expected Gregg’s palm or hands to … well, to hesitate. Or stop. But no, the rhythm was exactly the same. And his face lowered into that ruminative murmur men use when they chamois the car or whistle something, the soft murmur of thought joined to a hands-on job.

  Now Gregg was running into the kitchen—“I need some of that Château Chirac,” he said, by which he meant Paris tap water—and then he came back and said, between gulps, “Honey, you know I never give you advice, but that new Julien is husband-material.” He said it with a powerful stress on the hus and the ter, just as though he were going to zorro the air with a finger-snapping Z. “Seriously, doll,” and now he was no longer a black drag but the cozy waitress again, whispering a Kool-scented confidence as the toast in the toaster behind her started to burn, “if I were you, hon, I’d grab that one. Or else your daughter will.”

  Despite the weather-vane changes of voice and role, Gregg was serious.

  “What should I do?” Austin asked.

  “Invite him away for a weekend to some luxurious hotel.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Take the train to a nice little town.”

  But it was too soon to invite Julien anywhere except to dinner. He convinced Henry McVay, his rich friend, to have both of them over with Lauren Bacall, who was in town.

  “God,” Henry said, “can’t it be just us boys, Sweetie?”

  “No, Henry. Julien’s a married man. And besides, she’s a famous woman.”

  “Quelle barbe,” Henry grumbled, using the French idiom for what he was always saying in English, “What a bore.” “Not that I dislike Betty Bacall for an instant. She’s pure heaven. And very amusing.” He paused, having exhausted his store of Parisian adjectives. “It’s just that at my age I really don’t like formal evenings much anymore.” By “formal” he meant “heterosexual.”

  And yet when Austin had met him six years earlier, it had been at a big cocktail party at which only half the men had been gay and there’d been as many women as men.

  Austin had met half the people there before. The handsome, seventy-year-old McVay, a few sheets (even a mainsail) to the wind, had said in his penetrating voice, “This is outrageous! I’ve been here for forty-five years and you already know most of my friends. It’s a scandal!” He rolled his eyes dramatically to heaven.

  Austin laughed, knowing he’d just been complimented. McVay, who seldom liked new people unless they were very young and decorative, preferably preppie blonds, nevertheless took to Austin instantly and started inviting him out all the time. They had known many of the same people over the years; even though Austin was twenty years younger, Henry was convinced they belonged to the same milieu. After all, they’d both often visited Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and they’d both been mentioned, if in different volumes, in Ned Rorem’s memoirs. Most important, they were both connoisseurs, even if Henry owned the paintings and chairs he admired and Austin merely wrote about them. But Henry would forget that Austin was poor, or if not poor then someone who lived virtually hand to mouth, and would lapse into complaints about his servant problems, something he was far too much a gentleman to do with someone he’d fully registered was less fortunate than he.

  Soon they were best of friends. When Austin’s book on eighteenth-century French ceramics was published in New York and London, Henry had written him a glowing letter. It was the only letter from a friend he’d received, though a few specialists had sent him notes pointing out questionable attributions.

  Austin would never have risked offending McVay by saying so, but he thought of him as a father. Austin’s own father had been a heavy-drinking Southerner, a man so reclusive that he’d go days without talking but who, when necessary for currying favor to earn his living, could put in an impeccable social performance. This old guy who farted loudly, gabbled like a chicken farmer and wandered around his big eighteenth-century Virginia house unshaved, drunk and belligerent, had had the knack of dressing up like a duke on a yachting excursion when he had to. He’d treated his clients to a dinner of salty ham and sweet potatoes with pecans, cooked in Bourbon, kept his own drinking in check and kissed the hands of the wives on parting. He’d even made his dilapidated house gleam so that the water-stained wood floors looked antique and the hump-backed bed seemed worthy of having welcomed George Washington, as the family legend maintained. His father had been too poor and too lazy to hunt but he’d still had good old hunting prints hanging on the tattersall wallpaper in the main hallway, the one that divided the house in symmetrical halves and led to a staircase with steps rising in the smallest possible gradations, wide enough for ball gowns—stretched tight over many crinolines—to descend. Austin’s father had floated down into the family grave ten years ago on a cloud of Old Turkey, leaving behind nothing but debts.

  As it turned out, Lauren Bacall had already left Paris but McVay invited Nina Helier, a perfume heiress who was so old “she no longer had an age,” as the French say unkindly (elle n’a plus d’âge), though she was still in full possession of her beauty—well, if not her original beauty then a concocted latter-day version of that loveliness. She presented her immortal face to the viewer impassively as a goddess might—an idol, McVay’s oldest friend, the Count Montpassier, called her. When, just at the moment she was passing over the frontier into old age, she’d confided to Montpassier, “I don’t really like fags,” he’d spat out, “Dommage, madame, they are your future.” She wasn’t stupid and she’d instantly taken his point. That was when she’d abandoned her vampishness and become a regular guy, although for men of McVay’s generation she’d always be a Legend—more refined, more fascinating, certainly more mysterious than a mere actress like Bacall.

  Julien was hypnotized by her, although intimidated, which Austin could deduce only from his way of looking at her as though she weren’t sitting there next to him live.

  “He’s a charming young man,” Henry whispered loudly when the others had gone up to the terrace for coffee and the view. But no matter how much Austin ventured disparaging remarks about Julien to indicate that no comment would be judged out of bounds, McVay wouldn’t take the bait. He stuck with his kindly, formal generalities. He wouldn’t dish. Was it because Henry in fact wasn’t attracted to Julien, who was perhaps too swarthy or Gallic for him, and therefore he hadn’t really focused on hi
m? Or did Henry regard him as Austin’s new husband and thus beyond reproach or even characterization? “Charming,” he repeated with emphasis. “A delightful young man. He’s from Nancy, you say?”

  Julien and Austin walked along the Seine at midnight and stood on the wooden, pedestrian bridge, the Pont des Arts, and looked upstream toward the Musée d’Orsay and downstream at the point of the Île de la Cité that split the river in half. It was so late that all the illuminated buildings around them began to sink into darkness except the distant splendors of the Town Hall, which the mayor kept lit an extra half hour every night, just to prove his importance.

  They stood side by side and leaned in to each other. A long, low barge glided under the bridge. Moments later its wake lapped against the massive stone embankments where gay men were cruising one another.

  “What did you think of Nina?” Austin asked, because he was reluctant to mention Henry, too much a force in his life to talk about lightly.

  “She’s exactly the sort of woman I admire,” Julien said. “Silent. Superb. Entirely artificial.”

  “You like artifice?”

  “If there’s one thing I despise it’s a healthy, tanned, big-toothed American girl. No, what I admire is a pale Parisian woman, frail, a hothouse flower, expertly painted.”

  “Is your wife like that?”

  Julien shook his head sadly. “Not now. She’s become grotesquely fat and vulgar. But when I met her in Ethiopia she was delicate, sickly….”

  “Ethiopia?”

  “Yes, she grew up in a diplomatic family. She speaks five of their languages. I’ll show you pictures of her.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was teaching architecture in Addis Ababa.”

  “When? Under Haile Selassie?”